Students in the tech department at Coopersville High School are now able to use design programs that most colleges and many businesses in the industry don’t have and can’t afford to purchase.

The Siemens Corporation of Munich, Germany, recently approved a grant to provide $19.5 million worth of cutting-edge Unigraphic NX software to outfit the Coopersville High School’s CAD classes. “The program is so expensive and has so many components that companies usually purchase only part of the program to do the 3D design work the company is involved in,” said Coopersville teacher Mike Fritz, who submitted the grant application.

Each copy of the entire program lists for $780,000 and Siemens provided the school with 25 complete copies of the program, Fritz said. The district will have to pay about $2,300 annually to keep the programs current, but Fritz said that is a small price to be able to give students a leg up on finding a job. Coopersville now has all three of the major design programs used in the engineering design industry, according to Fritz. The Unigraphic NX program is used by engineers in several different industries to perform analysis of all type of designs and manufacturers with finished designs by using included machining modules, according to the Siemens’ information.

“It certainly gives our students an advantage when they go to college or go to work for a company that uses this software because we have the full program,” Fritz said.Ferris State University officials who recently spoke to students in the technical classes at Coopersville said that students at Ferris don’t have access to the design programs that are now found in the Coopersville lab.

Coopersville High School seniors Sydney Mason and Cody Kleinjans said that having the Unigraphic and other design programs has helped both of them as they look to study engineering in college next year. “We have already designed some things using the programs and seen how the programs works,” Cody said.

He said he and the other students training on the new design program this year have been able to see the possibilities a program like that brings. “I was able to redesign the frame of the school’s Electrothon car on the computer and know before we built it, that it will work,” he said.

Sydney said that in addition to the Advanced Placement classes she is taking at the school, the 3D design class, along with the department’s other “hands on” classes like wood shop, have given her a real appreciation for how one thing leads to another and how design is a collaborative effort.

Fritz said that students in the design classes have worked closely with the students in the wood and metal shops, plastic extrusion class, and other classes to design and build real world projects for actual customers. “We have been able to have students work collaboratively to complete these projects, “ Fritz said. Solving problems collaboratively is one of the state and federal education departments’ new common cores for student education.

“I think we are a model for how this type of education can be done,” said Coopersville Superintendent Ron Veldman. “This design program has huge practical applications for our students. We have formed great partnerships with local manufacturing companies who have provided the school with the knowledge of what types of skills our students need to have when they leave high school and go to work in those companies.”

Two years ago, the district formed the Manufacturing Engineering Partnership Program to help the school better educate students and to allow the companies to send representatives to the district to talk to teachers and students about the real world skills it takes to get jobs in those industries.

Veldman said the MEPP program has allowed the school to give students the practical knowledge of how the subjects they are learning in school translate to the real world.